Jean Baudrillard: the Marmite Philosopher

Love Him or Loathe Him ... Here's Jean Baudrillard - 

the Marmite Philosopher 

(SA/2024)

 

 

I. 

 

In response to my Boxing Day post - click here - an anonymous correspondent writes:

 

Even a plate of cold turkey leftovers is more digestible than the turgid (if for a time fashionable) nonsense that Baudrillard passed off as philosophy and which only pretentious idiots - such as yourself - continue to take seriously. 

      Sokal and Bricmont were spot-on to describe Baudrillard and those figures often associated with him - I won't designate them as thinkers - as intellectual imposters whose confusions, fantasies, and postmodern jargon for a time brought philosophy into disrepute and damaged the minds of generations of students. 

      As the above rightly conclude: 'When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.' [1]  

 

If this email is anything to go by, it would seem that the Christmas spirit doesn't last long; one wonders what would remain of my correspondent's argument if the vitriolic veneer were stripped away. 

 

 

II.

 

Of course, the above - aligning himself with the unfunny double act of Sokal & Bricmont - is not the first and won't be the last person to be triggered by Baudrillard, who is, we might concede, something of a Marmite philosopher; i.e., a divisive and polarising figure and thus something of an acquired taste.

 

Indeed, even those thinkers who emerged out of the same philosophical background - and with whom he is often categorised - often found his vision of contemporary culture as cynical and overly pessimistic; i.e., one that offered no critical solutions and seemed to render direct (political) action impossible.

 

He was, they said, merely a bleak fatalist trapped inside his own ideas and, according to Sylvère Lotringer, during the mid-late 1970s Deleuze quietly let it be known around Paris that he considered Baudrillard to be the shame of French intellectual life [2].  

 

Despite this, here we are at the fag end of 2024 and I find that just as I prefer cool memories to cold turkey, so I'd sooner spend time reading Baudrillard than M. Deleuze; a philosopher whom everyone seems to love and have acquired a taste for these days (apart from my Sokal & Bricmont quoting correspondent of course).     

 

Notes

 

[1] My correspondent is referring to the book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (Profile Books, 1998). The line quoted is the closing sentence of the chapter specifically written on Baudrillard (chapter 8). The book was first published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles (Editions Odile Jacob, 1997). 

 

[2] See Sylvère Lotringer, 'On Jean Baudrillard', in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 6, Number 2 (July, 2009): click here. 

      Lotringer explains how the publication of Baudrillard's Forget Foucault (1977) not only anatgonised the subject of the essay, but Foucault's close friend Gilles Deleuze and that whilst the work made Baudrillard (in)famous on the one hand, it got him excommunicated from French intellectual circles on the other.

 

On Background Radiation (in a Cultural-Philosophical Sense)

The Cosmic Microwave Background (NASA 2010)

 

 

I. 

 

Readers may recall the big hoo-ha created by physicists Sokal and Bricmont back in the late '90s when they criticised (and indeed mocked) philosophers and postmodern theorists for their misuse - as they saw it - of very precise scientific and mathematical concepts. 

 

Their book - first published in French as Impostures intellectuelles (1997) - polarized opinion, with those in the scientific community largely supportive, whilst opponents in the humanities argued that Sokal and Bricmont lacked understanding of the work they subjected to analysis and of how concepts are malleable and can thus be subtly (and sometimes playfully) reworked within different contexts and that doing so isn't necessarily a sign of charlatanism, ignorance, or pretension on behalf of thinkers such Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Irigaray. 

 

Nor is this reworking simply a sign of cognitive relativism and anti-scientific prejudice within European philosophy (though that's not to deny that such may exist). Using scientific terminology within a non-scientific context doesn't deny the original technical meaning, it expands the meaning and/or transfers it into a new environment (the terms are revealed as having a metaphorical component and capacity). 

 

Sokal and Bricmont may find this peculiarly offensive for a number of reasons, but then, on the other hand, some of us may find their linguistic puritanism and Francophobia equally objectionable. As Derrida rightly pointed out at the time, science and philosophy have long discussed their differences, but never with such an ugly emphasis placed on the nationality of individuals. 

 

(Derrida also stated, for the record, that there was neither relativism nor a naive rejection of reason in his work and hoped that in the future the debate might be pursued more seriously and with greater dignity: "at the level of the issues involved" [1].) 

 

 

II.                  

 

So why did I bring all this up once again? Well, because I have just been reading an interview with Peter Sloterdijk in which he mentions his fondness for the concept of background radiation ... 

 

Now, as Sokal and Bricmont would be quick to point out, this is a scientific term which refers to a measure of the ionising radiation present in the environment at a particular location originating from a variety of sources, both natural and artificial.

 

And as I'm sure they'd be equally quick to point out, Sloterdijk is a philosopher and cultural theorist - not a physicist - and, worse, he's a German thinker in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, so really shouldn't be allowed to use the concept of background radiation at all. 

 

Nevertheless, use it he does and in his own unique way which, hopefully, illustrates what I was saying above:

"I really like the concept of 'background radiation', especially applied to cultural structures. Astrophysicists may rack their brains about what background radiation means in cosmological terms. However, that there is something like cultural radiation from a darkened background - patterns of order that are so deeply hidden in the oldest things, so strongly embedded in the sediment of what we think is self-evident that they seem to escape any reflection [...]" [2]

 

As an interesting example of this cultural background radiation, Sloterdijk points to the fact we still use a technique of temporal ordering that was first developed in ancient Babylon:

 

"We live in the Babylonian week apparently naturally, without thinking that it was predicated on a theology of the Heavenly Seven, that is, on a kind of septemtheism, which means the worship of seven deities. The seven day week is a cultural creation because, unlike the day, the month and the year, it has no cosmic basis, but represents a freely made decision that fixes the arrangement of social time." [3] 

 

In sum: Sloterdijk nicely demonstrates how you can borrow a term from one discipline and redefine it within another - without in any way harming the original meaning or preventing its continued usage by others.

 

Notes 

[1] See Jacques Derrida, 'Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious', originally published in Le Monde, this short text can be found in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 70-72. It can also be found on Reddit by clicking here. 

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'With the Babble of Babylon in the Background', interview with Manfred Osten, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 313-14.

       

[3] Ibid., p. 314.